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J.W. Dunne (1866-1949) was an accomplished English aeronautical engineer and a designer of Britian's early military aircraft. His An Experiment with Time, first published in 1927, sparked a great deal of scientific interest in--and controversy about--his new model of multidimensional time.

A series of strange, troubling precognitive dreams (including a vision of the then future catastrophic eruption of Mt. Pelee on the island of Martininque in 1902) led Dunne to re-evaluate the meaning and significance of dreams. Could dreams be a blend of memories of past and future events? What was most upsetting about his dreams was that they contradicted the accepted model of time as a series of events flowing only one way: into the future. What if time wasn't like that at all?

All of this prompted Dunne to think about time in an entirely new way. To do this, Dunne made, as he put it,"an extremely cautious" investigation in a "rather novel direction." He wanted to outline a provable way of accounting for multiple dimensions and precognition, that is, seeing events before they happen. The result was a challenging scientific theory of the "Infinite Regress," in which time, consciousness, and the universe are seen as serial, existing in four dimensions.

Astonishingly, Dunne's proposed model of time accounts for many of life's mysteries: the nature and purpose of dreams, how prophecy works, the immortality of the soul, and the existence of the all-seeing "general observer," the "Witness" behind consciousness (what is now commonly called the Higher Self).

Here in print again is the book English playwright and novelist J.B. Priestley called "one of the most fascinating, most curious, and perhaps the most important books of this age."

Top customer reviews

This book is interesting not only in theory but in presentation. Although Dunne seems excited about his discoveries, his enthusiasm does not muddle the preciseness of his observations. It is an exposition of wonders, geared to explain away phenomena like clairvoyance, déjà vu, telepathy, etc., but he is confident and professional all throughout, at times playing his own skeptic, chicanery-free. Given the burden of empirical proof, the scientific validity of the book will always be called into question. A previous reviewer believes that "the main problem arises with the writer's assumption of time having an unlimited number of dimensions. This is a statement that Dunne does not even try to prove at any point of his otherwise rather meticulous analysis." In other words, Dunne conceives of time as being another dimension of space. He has no recourse but to assume that time has dimensions like space because humanity has rather limited tools of perception for the purpose of such a study. If time has dimensions, then it will take time to measure any unit of time, and one will need another unit to measure the measuring time, and so on, until infinity. In such a model, real time would be the unattainable border of this infinite series.

What this reviewer regarded as "mind-boggling philosophical statements" I found to be charming intuitive gems:

"Evolution has worked for possibly eight hundred million years towards the development of the brain. Today, as Professor McKendrick points out, nearly all the functions of our bodies are operating towards the end of the adequate nutrition of the grey matter. And it now appears that, apart from its self-sustaining and self-developing activities, the brain serves as a machine for teaching the embryonic soul to think."

My opinion of the book is best summed up in a preface written for the second Spanish edition by Jorge Luis Borges. It can be found in BIBLIOTECA PERSONAL (Emecé;, 1998). Borges later wrote an essay incorporating elements of the preface called "Time and J.W. Dunne" (1940), which is included in his SELECTED NON-FICTIONS (Penguin, 1999).

Since the essay can be found easily enough, here is my translation of the preface, written in 1934:

"A literary historian may one day write the history of a most recent genre in literature: the title. I recall none more admirable than the one on this volume. It is not merely for show; it ignites our interest in the text and sure enough the text does not disappoint. It is conversational in character and opens up marvelous possibilities for our conception of the world.

J.W. Dunne was an engineer, not a man of letters. Aeronautics is indebted to him for an invention which proved its efficiency in the First World War. His logical and mathematical mind was opposed to all things mystical. He arrived at his strange theory via a statistical study of his nightly dreams. He explained and defended the theory in three volumes that provoked a clamor of polemic. H.G. Wells accused of him of taking the first chapter of his "The Time Machine" (pub. 1895) much too seriously; Dunne responded in a note to his second edition, which is now in print. Likewise, Malcolm Grant refuted him in A NEW ARGUMENT FOR GOD AND SURVIVAL (1934).

Of the three volumes that constitute his completed work, THE SERIAL UNIVERSE is the most technical. The last, NOTHING DIES (1940), is downright popular science, meant for radio dispersal.

Dunne proposes an infinite series of times that flow in and out and because of one another. He assures us that upon our death we shall be handed the happy reins of eternity. We shall recover all of the instants of our lives and compose them in whatever manner is most pleasant to us. God and our friends and Shakespeare shall collaborate in this."

And the closing line of the essay:

"So splendid a thesis makes any fallacy committed by the author insignificant."

I read this book for the first time in 1948 and subsequently, over a number of years, found myself re-living dreams which I had had before.More, I have had dreams, or actions, which coincided with the event. As a result of this I am sympathetic to Dunnes hypothesis, but find it a bit difficult to swallow un-questioned.Dreaming about the past, or modifications of the past, I can accept. Dreaming about the future seems to defy all logic.However Dunne has put forward his possible explanation. That, and "Deja Vue", are open to a great deal conjecture, but no real explanation is available to this day.

This is the most interesting, accessible and convincing book on the nature of time that I have ever read. I would recommend it to everybody (and I do). The only thing I can say is read it and try Dunne's experiment for yourself (no equipment required except for a pen and paper). If you believe the future is inaccessible, prepare to be stunned.

I read this book because it seems to form the basis for the plot line of C. S. Lewis' short story, "The Dark Tower" (See my review of this book).

The premise of the book is that in our dreams, we see the past and the future. When we see into the past, we call it "memory." When we see the future, we call it "a strange dream." Dunn says that usually, our dreams are an odd mixture of past and future events, which is why we so often fail to recognize the future events when they occur.

So Dunne proposes an experiment to help you record your dreams, and notice the future events we dream about when they actually occur. I half-heartedly tried the experiment for a few days, and did actually dream of one future event, which happened the very next day after I dreamed of it.

In this regard, the book is quite fascinating, and Dunne may be right. However, the book is extremely difficult to read. Most of it is like trying to swim through mud. You cannot read a sentence or two without getting lost. Some of this might be because the book was written about 100 years ago, and Dunne was an aeronautical engineer.

But all of these difficult parts to read are his explanation for why and how we can "see" into the future. If you don't care about the scientific "how" and just want to replicate the experiment, the book pretty clearly and simply explains how to do it on your own.

If you do try the experiment, and see results, I would love to hear about them!